Post by Norm Sloan

From HAARETZ [Independent Tel Aviv Daily]: '"To write poetry after Auschwitz," the philosopher Theodor Adorno famously –infamously – said, "is barbaric." That was in 1951, when the dust of German fascism was still settling in the mind of Paul Celan, who was indeed writing poetry after Auschwitz, and after the Holocaust had turned his world over. Celan, from the Bukovina region of Eastern Europe, lost home and family to the German murder machine, spending the rest of his life approximating, with language, his immeasurable grief.